St. John's May 13/16

Yesterday's plane trip was long but uneventful. We were picked up at the airport (and hosted for the night) by Roberta and her daughter Claire. She was a part of my day home many years ago, and now she's finishing grade 11! The family moved to St. John's when Claire turned 5, and that was the year I closed the home and starting working at preschool.

This morning on the way to find our B&B we happened to pass Newman Wine Vaults, one of our possible things to see, so we dropped in. They aren't officially open for the season yet, but had opened up specially for a cruise ship tour, so they let us come in as well. They didn't charge us an entry fee, and gave us each a glass of port to sample! The two vaults here are the oldest buildings in St. John's, dating back to the late 1700's. Wine was shipped accross the Atlantic to mature here, because it was deemed to have a much better flavour.

Our next stop was The Rooms, a combination of a museum, art galleries and archives. The history of Newfoundland and Labrador was presented with interesting displays. This province not only has strong Irish roots, but native ones as well. It was evident that the early settlers would have had a rough life here.

We made two other quick stops - Basilica Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, and Cape Spear, the latter of which is the most easternly point in North America. The church dates back to the mid 1800's and is  a national historic site. Because of seeing many cathedrals across the pond that are much older and more impressive, this one didn't excite us very much.

Dinner was good but very spicy Indian cuisine, and at lunch I tried cod tongue, which was breaded and tasty (isn't anything good when breaded? lol!) Michael remembered trying that before he knew he was celiac and recommended it (he was in St John's briefly many years ago for a conference.)

We were able to catch a couple of hours of an Irish pub session which was quite good. They only had 2 fiiddles plus one accordion, banjo and bodran. Amazingly we couldn't hear the banjo, but the pub was a bit noisy. We either knew or could have played about three quarters of the tunes, but didn't bring our instruments on this trip. Still it was enjyable to just listen.